


Demobbed

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drug Addiction, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-25 07:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7524625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're made for war, all of them: Steve, his team of Commandos, the smirking asshole nonchalantly waving his rifle around at Steve's side. And then they lose the sniper, America's Captain crashes a plane to save the world, and no one seems to know how men like them survive without a gun in their hands and a target on their backs. (But that's all right - there's a scrip for that.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Demobbed

**Author's Note:**

> smaulock has this awesome AU gif and idea [here](http://smaulock.tumblr.com/post/91252267995/a-stucky-au), and it turns out that I really didn't do it justice at all, but this is what came from that.

They sent Steve to rehab before insisting that he go to NA. Steve, personally, didn’t see the point in either. Sam thought that visiting Steve’s primary care physician would be enough to cut off his access to oxycontin, or alter the prescription to something that Steve couldn’t crush and snort. Sam had forgotten that it was Steve’s therapist who had prescribed the Xanax, Doral and Valium, and Steve had never mentioned that “America’s Captain” could visit _any_ doctor and come out with pretty much any drug he cared to get his hands on.

Sam had found Steve the second time, and driven him from the hospital to the rehab center. Apparently Natasha had called ahead, after finding Steve the first time. “I won’t do this again,” she’d told him, slapping him awake and rolling him out of the puddle of vomit where he’d been resting. “I won’t keep coming around just to watch you die.”

“Then don’t come,” Steve had managed, more lucid than he wanted to be. “You can watch the fireworks from Arlington, and fucking cheer.”

He had met Natasha under fire in the Crimea, inscrutable and lovely even as ash drifted into her hair and the tires behind them burst into flame. He couldn’t recall if she had looked disgusted when she left him to die, or inexcusably sad. She hadn’t waited for the ambulance, but whatever she had done, Capt. Rogers’s suicide watch in the hospital hadn’t made the morning papers.

Neither had his month in rehab. Steve’s first suicide had made global news, earned him a Medal of Honor for crashing a drone plane into the Mediterranean and preventing World War III. They’d called it heroism, dragged him in front of the President and kept him off the talk shows. Sent him to VA doctors and therapists who gave him antidepressants he didn’t take, opiates for the damage he’d done to his back in the crash and benzos for the anxiety and sleeplessness.

Sent him to an apartment in DC with an Army pension, an undefined leave for “health reasons;” too much time on his hands and his best friend’s face seared into the backs of his eyes and across the palms of his hands. His best friend’s corpse, the weight of a dead child in his hands, the fabric of a hijab melted into a woman’s skin. Over a decade in the military, years leading a strike team so elite that most service men and women believed the Commandos were a myth – for Steve, rehab was simply a month to lay awake on scratchy sheets and see Bucky’s face through the scope of every rifle he’d ever carried, every death bleeding out under his hands.

“What makes you happy?” Sam asked him – all the therapists asked him, constant and unvarying, worth less to Steve than the duffel of his things Nat had brought to the hospital. “You’re a coward,” she had said, slinging the bag onto the bed in Capt. Rogers’s private room. “You want to die? Then _die_.”

What made him happy? The feel of a gun in his hand, a map under his fingers. Fine, granular sand thick in his hair, a storm rolling in, pitting their mission against the elements. The rush of a HALO jump, the free fall and the readiness to land in a world that balanced on the edge of a knife. His sergeant. His sniper. His left hand.

The Colonel had sent Bucky on a sniper’s mission. Had cut off Steve’s arm, when he told him that Sgt. Barnes would not be coming home. Had cut out Steve’s heart.

There was so much joy left in the world, the therapists said. So much to live for. _I’m already dead_ , Steve didn’t tell them, because they wouldn’t understand.

“What is there to live for?” Steve had replied, on the sunny, humid day Sam made the drive. They sat at a picnic table and Steve smoked, because everyone at rehab smoked. Sam had said Nat couldn’t make it. Lying, in a way, because as the head of the Russian ambassador’s security force, Nat made her own rules. Honest, in another, because Nat had refused to watch Steve die.

“Yourself?” Sam tried, that rueful half-smile already on his face, because he knew Steve better than he ought to, given that they hadn’t seen each other since flight school years ago. Steve scowled, stamped out the cigarette with shaky hands. “All right, not your thing just yet. What about the fight, then? You’re still in the Army.” He hesitated, coughed. “Barnes gave his life for this country, yeah? And you can honor that sacrifice by being useful – which means not doing drugs.”

“Don’t you fucking tell me how to _honor_ Bucky,” Steve had snapped, stretched taut and brittle without the drugs to numb the loss. “He’s _dead_. What good is the whole goddamn country if he’s _dead_?”

What good was the Army, if it couldn’t keep Bucky safe? Steve had made Lieutenant at twenty-one, run through OCS because Col. Fury saw potential in him, saw something that no one else had ever seen. And then he’d thrown an eighteen-year-old Army brat at him, kid with what Fury claimed was a “good eye” and “a few problems with authority” that might need ironing out.

Steve Rogers had joined the Army alone, his mother dead two weeks before his eighteenth birthday, his friends all off to university. He had spent years around friends who’d joined with their “buddies,” run through buddies of his own who claimed that he was too quiet, too bossy, too queer, too straight-laced. Hadn’t understood camaraderie, until Fury had offered him his own team and the Commandos had tumbled into his life. Hadn’t understood soul mates, until a kid with a perfect shot and a trouble-making mouth had swaggered into his life for a few months, trained and gone again for five years until Steve had found him in a POW camp and begged him onto the team.

They had been buddies. They had been best friends. If they had been anything more – well, only the Commandos knew, and they weren’t saying a single, goddamn word. Fury had given them all compassionate leave, to go watch Barnes’ empty coffin lowered into consecrated ground. Steve had still been in hospital in the Maghreb, dosed on morphine to keep down the pain. They’d intended to help his physical pain, but what was good for the goose …well, medicating the pain seemed to be the only good idea any of Steve’s doctors had had.

Sam had combed through his apartment, Steve knew. Might have gotten Nat to help, though he couldn’t remember if he had introduced the two of them. They would have cleared out whatever pills they could find – and Nat could find pretty much anything – but they also underestimated Steve. People seemed to think that America’s Captain would be all old-fashioned charm and apple pie, and even those who had fought with him occasionally forgot that Steve had captained the Commandos for five years. He would go to NA, because Sam had stolen his motorcycle and his license and was currently sitting in the car glowering at Steve’s profile, and then he would go home and dig out the scrips and pills that neither of them had seen.

Thirty days without medication. Sleep deprivation was giving Steve hallucinations, sending him into episodes during group therapy, desperate to protect Bucky’s corpse. Not that he had seen Bucky die. None of them had seen Bucky die, but Steve was thirty years old, had been in the Army for a dozen years, overseas and behind enemy lines for more than two-thirds of that. He had seen enough death to draw a clear picture.

He had dreamed Bucky dead for years, woken shaking and drenched with sweat, his scream trained into silence. He lived his worst nightmare every morning now, when he opened his eyes.

“Get out of the car. Go in through the doors. Sit down in the nice folding chair, and drink the bad coffee. I will pick you up in an hour.” Sam didn’t reach across Steve and open the passenger door, but it was a near thing.

“I’m Catholic,” Steve argued, staring out the car window at the Baptist church, one hand going obediently to the door handle. They both knew that he would go to NA the way he had gone to rehab. Sam healed people, and his fussing was all that Steve had left from his entire adult life. His fussing, and the cold, dead weight of the medals in his palm.

“Great. You can nominate me for sainthood. Now _get out of the car._ ”

Steve got.

The meeting was in some back room down a hall, past several bulletin boards with pictures of smiling kids and parishioners, alerts for upcoming Bible studies and summer rafting trips. He followed the smell of weak coffee, poured himself a cup before dropping into a folding chair at the back of a fairly busy room.

He hadn’t been around this many people, outside rehab, since he’d been put on leave almost half a year ago. Bucky had died in January, surrounded by snow whenever Steve closed his eyes. The other men and women mostly left him alone, and several of them scanned him over and moved away. Combat veterans. The people who couldn’t help but check each room for its exits, for the unexamined boxes and trash cans. These were the people who recognized that Steve Rogers was built to be a threat and shifted away, even if the media had hailed him as a hero.

After a month in rehab, Steve could focus on his coffee and tune out the meeting, count stains on the maroon carpet and try to relax his shoulders and not map out how to infiltrate and bring down the church. PTSD, the VA counselor had said, when Steve went to get his prescriptions. Possible TBI. Hyper-vigilance, she worried. Paranoia. Common sense, Steve called it, but no one was asking him.

He didn’t pay attention until they started going around the room for introductions, and even then it was with the parts of his brain that weren’t planning on how to escape Sam’s house and hot wire his car. Steve had never been brilliant at espionage – a tall, white man with blond hair stood out in too many of the countries they’d worked in – but he’d learned years ago to divide his consciousness, to take in the world around him without focusing too closely on the details.

“Uh.” The man currently speaking was too thin. A few rows in front of Steve, sprawled in his chair like he occupied more space than he did, foot tapping and fingers of his right hand pressed, sweating, to his jeans. Still going through withdrawal, most likely. “I’m, uh, Sergeant James Barnes.”

_ Bucky, asshole. You want to talk to Barnes, you can call my dad. _

_ Can I? Because you seem like you could use a damn spanking. _

_Well, he forgot his parachute during his last jump. So if you want to spank me,_ Lieutenant Rogers, _you’ll have to do it yourself._

“Bucky?” Steve couldn’t help himself, even knowing that insomnia had put Bucky everywhere, that sobriety had brought him gasping his last breaths into Steve’s every waking thought. He was on his feet, already pushing through the other chairs to see the man’s face.

“Steve?” The other man had dark hair, shaggy and too long. Had pale blue eyes, dark scruff highlighting his cheekbones and the dimple in his chin, a pink and shiny scar running through his left eyebrow and just outside the corner of his eye. “God, _Steve_?”

There might have been more, but Steve had scooped the other man out of the chair and into his arms, unaware that he kept murmuring “Bucky” into brown hair. All his hallucinations had disintegrated under his fingertips, but this man breathed firmly under Steve’s hands, curled an arm around him in return.

“I thought you were dead,” one of them said, though Steve couldn’t tell which one. He buried his face in hair that smelled like the stupidly expensive shampoo that Bucky insisted on buying whenever they had leave, wasting the pay that accumulated in their accounts on styling products and room service while they debauched countless hotels across Europe and Asia. He breathed in hair and sweat and the faint hint of familiar soap and held on.

Eventually the meeting leader coughed politely. Then stood up, and proved that he probably wasn’t an emotionally compromised veteran when he tapped Steve on the shoulder.

Steve dropped, tucking Bucky underneath him as they hit the ground, knife out of his belt and in his hand even before he rolled up in a defensive shield. Bucky went easily, the controlled fall something they had practiced endlessly before, though he hit the carpet a little hard. No one would touch Bucky. No one would hurt him, even when he only existed in Steve’s head.

“Steve? Hey, Steve,” came Bucky’s soft voice, hoarser than Steve recalled, cutting through the haze in his mind where the man above him spouted only empty sounds. “I think he just wants us to go hug it out somewhere that’s not here. And maybe not stab him, if you can handle that.”

Only Bucky could drag his knee that dangerously close to Steve’s balls, poised between a threat and a promise. He kept his right arm curled over Steve’s bicep, waited for Steve’s breathing to even out and pull him back into the moment.

“Steve,” he said again, and this time Steve let his gaze follow Bucky’s voice to his mouth, lips pale and cracked the way they had looked on a hundred missions, a thousand desert nights. “You’re scaring the jumpy sober people. C'mon.”

Bucky used the hand on Steve’s arm to lever himself up, graceful even as his left sleeve caught Steve in the face. His empty left sleeve.

Nearly a decade of training meant that once Bucky decided something wasn’t a threat, so did Steve’s subconscious. He folded his knife and stood up, forwent an apology to the confused NA participants in favor of putting both hands on Bucky’s jutting hips and pushing them through the doors and into the hall.

“You’re not dead,” he told the shell of Bucky’s ear, not waiting for the door to slam before gathering the other man back into his arms. Bucky’s right arm went around his waist, and his left arm – his left arm wasn’t there.

“Not yet,” Bucky agreed, wry and pointed. “Fuckers tried pretty hard, though.”

“What happened to you?” Steve wondered, running his hands up and down Bucky’s spine to prove this was real, catching his calluses on the fabric of Bucky’s unseasonable long-sleeved shirt. “Fury told us you’d died.” _They buried you. They put you in the ground, and kept telling me not to follow._

“Was out with Barton for a run. Got blown up. Got caught. Shit went down, and I got back here on medical discharge.” Bucky spoke without inflection, gave a shrug that dragged his right shoulder down. “Fury said you were gone.”

“Fury’s the most goddamn manipulative bastard on the fucking planet,” Steve swore, and clutched Bucky a little tighter. “Didn’t you see the news? They gave me a medal for being an idiot.”

“It’s your most endearing quality,” Bucky informed his neck, the words hitting Steve’s skin in small, moist puffs of air. “I wasn’t really watching the news. And if you’re not dead, what are you doing _here_ , Rogers? No one goes to church on a Tuesday, and anyway, you’re Catholic.”

Steve fidgeted, and Bucky leaned back and shoved his nose against Steve’s. He had never taken anyone’s shit, not Fury’s or Steve’s or Capt. Rogers’s. “I, um. I might have a problem with my meds,” he hissed in a rush, hoping Bucky wouldn’t hear. “And anyway,” he countered, “what are you doing here? And why don’t you have a prosthetic?”

“I do have one.” Bucky glowered, daring Steve to make something of it. “I don’t wear it. It’s just in the way, and you can’t shoot up through a plastic arm.”

“Shoot u- _Heroin_? Bucky, Jesus, what the fuck.” Bucky leveled a glare at him that made Steve blush and look away. “Right, yes. Okay. Thanks for sharing?”

“Did you want to applaud me, too?” Bucky rolled his eyes. His fingers trembled, clammy where he’d tucked them under Steve’s thin t-shirt. Heroin.

“I want to bring you home,” he answered honestly, rubbing his cheek against Bucky’s stubble, feeling sand and desert heat and layers of camouflage between them. _What makes you happy?_ Bucky’s lips pursed during a battle, his teeth a flash of white on a hillside after the perfect shot. His pulse, thundering steady under too prominent ribs.

“Thought I was already there,” Bucky retorted, and pressed himself into Steve’s tight embrace.


End file.
